Cleaning up Kentucky

Whitney Lewis leads by example

YOU MAY SEE HER paddling a faded blue kayak, or on foot along the shoreline, picking up trash at a lake or stream near you. 

Her name is Whitney Brooke Lewis, and cleaning up Kentucky’s streams and lakeshores is her passion.

She leads a nonprofit, social media-generated movement, Cleaner Kentucky Inc., which has spread across the state among more than 8,000 volunteers who’ve picked up well over 1 million grocery bags of trash. Another million bags are expected to be filled by year’s end.

It all began in 2023 as Whitney was gathering driftwood and rocks for use in her handcrafted art creations—SunKYst Sticks and Stones.

“I’m thinking, ‘If I’m here picking up rocks and driftwood, I can pick up a bag of trash, too. I can give back to Earth a little bit.’”

Now, the 39-year-old mother of two daughters, resident of rural Nelson County and consumer-member of both Salt River Electric and Nolin RECC can hardly believe the support from Kentuckians and others who’ve responded to the waterway cleanup challenge that she organized as an observance of Earth Day on April 22, her birthday. 

Numerous media have spread her story across Kentucky and beyond. The Nevada maker of the Grappler pick-up tool that she uses featured a story on its website about the success of her campaign.

Whitney alone has collected more than 31,300 bags of litter that she hauls to a landfill in her 20-year old SUV or the 1998 Ford F-150 with nearly 280,000 miles, which was donated by a friend. She receives no government help, but has managed to support her effort so far through donations, residuals from a retirement fund and income from sales of her hand-crafted stone and driftwood art. 

Volunteers send her their photos with the total number of bags they’ve filled each week. Plastic grocery bags are most often used in the cleanup because, she says, “everybody has an abundance of them.” 

“Kentucky’s going to be the cleanest state in the country,” she says.

Volunteers from other states have contacted her about the campaign and have given her hope that the waterway cleanup will spread well beyond Kentucky.

In 2023 she was honored with the Beautify the Bluegrass Governor’s Award, given by the Governor’s office in partnership with Kentucky’s electric cooperatives and Kentucky Living. Other encouragement for her effort often comes in the most unexpected moments. Early in the campaign, she was picking up litter near one of the boat ramps at Cedar Creek Lake in Lincoln County at dusk one evening when a fisherman approached with a piece of trash.

“He said, ‘I thought I’d better pick this up and bring it over to you. I just threw this down over there earlier this afternoon.’” 

Soon, other fishermen were helping.

“They got into their vehicles and turned on their headlights and started picking up trash,” Whitney recalls. “I drove home that night with a trunk full of very smelly trash … and a heart full of hope.”